Jan Schreiber

Jan Schreiber (born 1941) is an American poet, translator, and literary critic who has been part of the renascence of formal poetry that began in the late twentieth century. He is the author of three books of verse and two books of verse translation. He was a co-founder of the literary magazine, Canto: Review of the Arts, which flourished in the 1970s, and as a literary editor he launched the poetry chapbook series at the Godine Press. He is a recipient of the Carey Thomas Award for creative publishing.

Born in Wisconsin, Schreiber attended Stanford University, where he received his BA, then earned an MA at the University of Toronto and a PhD at Brandeis University where he studied with the poet J.V. Cunningham. Although he taught for brief periods at Tufts University and Lowell Technological Institute (now the University of Massachusetts Lowell), he spent most of his life as a researcher in the social sciences (founding the Social Science Research Institute) and a software entrepreneur (founding MicroSolve Corporation).

As a poet, Schreiber has written mainly in traditional forms. Though most of his verse consists of short lyric poems, he is also known for sharp, satirical epigrams of the kind commonly associated with Cunningham, and he has produced a few longer works extending to some 150 lines.

Beginning in 2004 Schreiber began writing for the on-line journal Contemporary Poetry Review, for which he produced numerous critical articles, some on individual poets, some on influential critics and scholars, and some on the development of the poetic canon.

Examples of his work appear in the on-line anthologies The Hypertexts and Poem Tree. Seven of his poems were set to music by Paul Alan Levi in a song cycle for tenor and piano called Zeno's Arrow, which has been performed in Massachusetts and New York.